Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation (NASDAQ:GLDD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Scott Kornblau: Yes, I mean, — this is — I mean, none of this is new to us. This is how we saw it playing out. Again, I don’t recall Adam, everybody has consensus right now. A portion, a small portion of Q1 is timing from that one dry dock that flipped a month or so into the second quarter. So, you may make a small adjustment for that. And again, we have this additional dry docking, which obviously is accretive at the previous cold-stacked vessel that will have utilization. But again, when I think about the year, again, nothing has changed. We’ve been saying for quite some time. This is going to be a solid year return to normalcy and it’s exactly how it’s still shaping up.

Adam Thalhimer: How do you expect backlog to trend?

Scott Kornblau: Yes, I mean we — when you have $1 billion of backlog coming into the year, it means you don’t have that much availability as you normally do. So, I think we’ve been pretty consistent to think that we would just maintain $1 billion in perpetuity is likely not going to happen because we are going to be rolling off a lot. But as Lasse said, this market is extremely strong. There are a lot of opportunities coming up, and we do have availability in 2025. We also have some flexibility on some of the backlog that we plan on executing in 2024 that we can push to the right if we find opportunities. So, we’ll be consistent in bidding jobs at the margins that we need for our vessels, but there are a lot of opportunities getting ready to come up over the next few months.

Adam Thalhimer: Okay. More on the beach nourishment or capital. And then you mentioned LNG. There are a lot of opportunities.

Scott Kornblau: Yes, there are.

Adam Thalhimer: And then any update on Title XI?

Scott Kornblau: As — not a lot. We continue to have dialogue with them. But as we mentioned in the last quarter, we’re not going to wait anymore, and that’s why — we went ahead and did this financing, but this financing maintains a lot of flexibility with very favorable call provisions and this delay draw feature where we’ll continue to work that. If we’re able to do it, we can swap this out fairly reasonably. So, dialogue continues, but I’m just done making predictions as to when we think that will finally go forward.

Adam Thalhimer: Okay, that’s the last time I’ll ask. And then just back half margins you’ve done low 20s gross and adjusted EBITDA margins for a couple of quarters in a row now. It sounds like it’s not going to be that way in Q2, but you get back to that in the back half.

Scott Kornblau: Yes, I mean the backlog is still mostly comprised of capital, over three-fourths of it is, and a lot of that will get executed during the remainder the year. As I mentioned, we have a little white space to fill. But assuming that gets filled, again, there’s no reason to think the second half of the year is not going to look what I would call normal when you have this much capital backlog, and I think the last couple of quarters demonstrates what we can do when we have the proper mix of backlog.

Adam Thalhimer: Great. Thanks Scott.

Scott Kornblau: Thank you.

Operator: So, thank you. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Tina for closing remarks.

Tina Baginskis: Thank you. We appreciate the support of our shareholders, employees, and business partners and we thank you for joining us in this discussion about the important developments and initiatives in our business. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings discussion. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you for participation in today’s conference. This now does conclude the program. You may disconnect.

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